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Deep life

13 February 1999

By Jon Copley

JAPANESE scientists have built an artificial deep-sea vent and shown that it
can create the building blocks for life.

Deep-sea vents, where hot, mineral-rich water erupts from the ocean floor,
have long been touted as the sites where life originated. A team led by Koichiro
Matsuno at the University of Technology in Nagaoka constructed a model vent to
see if it would yield the simple molecules needed to get life started.

The artificial vent consists of a flow reactor where water is heated to
between 110 °C and 350 °C in one chamber pressurised to 200 atmospheres,
and cooled to near-freezing in another. The water then returns to the heating
chamber, just as seawater cycles through the circulation system of a deep-sea
vent.

The scientists added the amino acid glycine to the system. When they sampled
the water as it cycled through the artificial vent, they found that the amino
acid molecules had joined up to form peptides (Science, vol 283, p
831). The concept is simple, Matsuno says: “Even an undergraduate student can do
the experiments.”

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The peptides grew even longer when the researchers added copper, which is
frequently found in water from natural vents, to their system.

Although other evidence suggests that life originated at cooler temperatures(In Brief, 16 January, p 23),
Matsuno does not see this as a problem, as vents
are surrounded by cold water. “Life there could be hot for short periods and
cold for long periods,” he says.

“This work adds weight to the idea that vents were the site where life on
Earth began,” says Joe Cann, a geologist at the University of Leeds who studies
the origins of life.